Mary Lamb - Page 2

foolish men taunt women with inability to keep secrets. But women who talk
much often do keep secrets--there are nooks in their hearts where the sun
never enters, and where those nearest them are never allowed to look. More
lives are blasted by secrecy than by frankness--ay! a thousand times. Why
should such a thing as a secret ever exist? 'Tis preposterous, and is
proof positive of depravity. If you and I are to live together, my life
must be open as the ether and all my thoughts be yours. If I keep back
this and that, you will find it out some day and suspect, with reason,
that I also keep back the other. Ananias and Sapphira met death, not so
much for simple untruthfulness as for keeping something back.

Elizabeth Lamb sought to protect herself against an unappreciative mate by
secrecy (perhaps she had to), and the habit grew until she kept secrets as
a business--she kept foolish little secrets. Did she get a letter from her
aunt, she read it in suggestive silence and then put it in her pocket. If
visitors called she never mentioned it, and when the children heard of it
weeks afterward they marveled.

And so shy little Mary Lamb wondered what it was her mother kept locked up
in the bottom drawer of the bureau, and Mary was told that children must
not ask questions--little girls should be seen and not heard.

At night, Mary would dream of the things that were in that drawer, and
sometimes great, big, black things would creep out through the keyhole and
grow bigger and bigger until they filled the room so full that you
couldn't breathe, and then little Mary would cry aloud and scream, and her
father would come with a strap that was kept on a nail behind the
kitchen-door and teach her better than to wake everybody up in the middle
of the night.

Yet Mary loved her mother, and sought in many ways to meet her wishes, and
all the time her mother kept the bureau-drawer locked, and away somewhere
on a high shelf was hidden all tenderness--all the gentle, loving words
and the caresses which children crave.

And little Mary's life seemed full of troubles, and the world a grievous
place where everybody misunderstands everybody else; and at nighttime she
would often hide her face in the pillow and cry herself to sleep.

But when she was ten years of age a great joy came into her life--a baby
brother came! And all the love in the little girl's heart was poured out
for the puny baby boy. Babies are troublesome things, anyway, where folks
are awful poor and where there are no servants and the mother is not so
very strong. And so Mary became the baby's own little foster-mother, and
she carried him about, and long before he could lisp a word she had told
him all the hopes and secrets of her heart, and he cooed